Samuel Alfred Beadle

Samuel Alfred Beadle was born into slavery on August 17, 1857, in Atlanta. Toward the end of the Civil War, his mother brought him to Rankin County, Mississippi, and after the war, they moved to Jackson, Mississippi. For his undergraduate studies, he attended Atlanta University and Tougaloo College and later received legal training.

In 1884, Beadle passed the Mississippi bar, and although racial segregation laws prevented Beadle from appearing before many Jackson judges, he kept a successful civil practice for more than forty years with his partner, fellow African American lawyer Perry Howard.  

Fifteen years into practicing law, Beadle began his writing career as an author by first writing verse for his friends. He was part of the Harlem Renaissance movement and his first published work, Sketches from a Life in Dixie (Scroll Publishing and Literary Syndicate, 1899), consisted of seven stories and fifty-three poems. Several of his works in this collection directly respond to the oppressive reality of institutionalized racism and segregation in the American South.

Beadle’s second book was a collection of short stories, Adam Shuffler (Harmon Publishing Co., 1901), that serves as a commentary on African American life in the South and where some of the stories employ regional dialects. Eleven years later, Beadle published his final volume of poetry Lyrics of the Under World (W. A. Scott, 1912), which won critical acclaim for the craft and thematic content of Beadle’s treatment and observations of the maltreatment and second-class citizenship of African Americans. The collection also contains early photographs by his son, Richard H. Beadle, one of Mississippi’s only Black photographers.

In 1930, Beadle moved to Chicago, where he practiced law until his death in 1932.